What Everyone Needs to Learn from the Data Journalism Handbook

It’s hard to pay attention to the business of journalism without hearing about data journalism or data-driven journalism. But despite all the discussion of the topic, there’s precious little documentation to guide practicing and future journalists in becoming proficient in it. The Data Journalism Handbook aims to fix that, albeit at a high level.

The Data Journalism Handbook effort started at a workshop at the London MozFest 2011 last November. From there, the handbook represents the work of “an international, collaborative effort involving dozens of data journalism’s leading advocates and best practitioners.” This includes folks from ProPublica, The Washington Post, the BBC, The New York Times and many others.

The result, so far, is an online book that’s just now in beta. Eventually it will also be published in dead tree and e-book form by O’Reilly. However, given the nature of the tome, it’s most useful online. As you’d expect from a title that was born at a Mozilla conference, the text is full of links to